Biography

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Bryan Lee O'Malley quotes

In my teens and university and stuff, video games became more realistic, or they started to.

Doubt yourself all you want, but you have to make choices in life and live with them.

'Monkey Island 2' was a huge game for me. It kind of taught me all about comedy.

I'm always exploring other people: trying to figure out myself, trying to figure out everyone.

The first Nintendo game I ever got was 'Clash at Demonhead.' I got into anime and manga thanks to that Canadian classic, 'Sailor Moon.'

I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent.

There were times over the years when I wanted to take a break from 'Scott Pilgrim,' or even just stop doing 'Scott Pilgrim,' when I was feeling down or whatever.

When I was in the middle of the 'Scott Pilgrim' series, and it was slowly becoming more popular, though still not financially solvent, I had this real bratty instinct to turn around and do something super arty and dark. I felt dismissed by comics culture, stuck in between the artcomix world and the nerdcomix world, and I was cranky about it.

After a long period of not drawing, you have to, like, relearn how to draw. It's not very fun.

Culture is evolving, and I'm along for the ride.

Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit. The new releases are always going to bolster the old releases.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

I didn't expect 'Scott Pilgrim' to be successful. I just made this weird comic to entertain my friends.

I don't really picture anyone when I'm drawing. They just become their own completed person with googly eyes.

When I was a kid, I desperately wanted more background information on especially cartoonists.

Writing music is sort of my hobby, but it's been falling off more and more. Doing comic books takes up my entire life.

I just have this thing in my head that I want to do serious stories that are still just way too cute and drawn in a really cute, appealing, rounded, childish way, and it's like, I don't know if it makes sense - but it's just something I'm really strongly compelled to do.

I'm too young to have experienced firsthand the '70s rock, but when I was in high school, me and my friends were super into Neil Young. That was the grunge era, and he was considered cool again.

'Seconds' is grounded in the reality of this restaurant environment, and I did do plenty of research, so there's that. It takes place in a town that is like a kinder, gentler fairy tale version of reality. Then it takes off into a story that is very strange, very mental.

Tumblr culture and the whole reappropriation-without-context thing are a double-edged sword in that they both raise awareness of my work and also kind of devalue it at the same time.